Posts tagged computer science

After realising that lessons on Microsoft Office aren't particularly useful for schoolchildren, the UK government has started doubling down on coding. After launching a new computing curriculum in September, the Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to introduce a new Computer Science GCSE by 20...

Back in the day, computer science was as legitimate a career path for women as in medicine, law or science. But in 1984, the number of females majoring in computing-related subjects began to fall, and is now as low as 20 percent compared to those other three. It's a surprising trend that NPR's Pla...

"All these people who've made it big have their own variation of the same story, where they felt lucky to be exposed to computer programming at the right age, and it bloomed into something that changed their life," explains the organization's co-founder, Ali Partovi, seated in the conference room ...

Alan Turing would have turned 100 this week, an event that would have, no doubt, been greeted with all manner of pomp -- the centennial of a man whose mid-century concepts would set the stage for modern computing. Turing, of course, never made it that far, found dead at age 41 from cyanide poisoni...

How do you fancy a 20 percent boost to your processor's performance? Research from the North Carolina State University claims to offer just that. Despite the emergence of fused architecture SoCs, the CPU and GPU cores typically still work independently. The University hoped that by assigning tasks ...

Before you go complaining about your job, take a moment to remember the MESM project, which just marked the 60th anniversary of its formal recognition by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The project, headed by Institute of Electrical Engineering director Sergey Lebedev, was born in a laboratory bu...

It's bad enough listening to your therapist drone on about the hatred you harbor toward your father. Pretty soon, you may have to put up with a hyper-insightful computer, as well. That's what researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid have begun developing, with a new system capable of re...

Pull out the candles and champagne, because the Intel 4004 is celebrating a major birthday today -- the big four-oh. That's right, it's been exactly four decades since Intel unveiled the world's first commercially available CPU, with an Electronic News ad that ran on November 15th, 1971. It all...

Color us a yellow shade of mendacious, but if we designed something that works 99.999999999997 percent of the time, we'd probably round off and give ourselves a big ol' 100 percent A+. We'd probably throw in a smiley faced sticker, too. Computer scientist Holger Hermanns, however, is a much more ...

We're getting reports today that Dennis Ritchie, the man who created the C programming language and spearheaded the development of Unix, has died at the age of 70. The sad news was first reported by Rob Pike, a Google engineer and former colleague of Ritchie's, who confirmed via Google+ that the com...

The man on your left is Dr. Peng Ning -- a computer science professor at NC State whose team, along with researchers from IBM, has developed an experimental new method for safely securing cloud-stored data. Their approach, known as a "Strongly Isolated Computing Environment" (SICE), would essentiall...

We've already seen how awkward computers can be when they try to speak like humans, but researchers from North Carolina State and Georgia Tech have now developed a program that could make it easier to show them how it's done. Their approach, outlined in a recently published paper, would allow dev...

So, this is pretty... big. At this very moment, researchers at IBM are building the largest data drive ever -- a 120 petabyte beast comprised of some 200,000 normal HDDs working in concert. To put that into perspective, 120 petabytes is the equivalent of 120 million gigabytes, (or enough space to...

Love technology? Love journalism? Well, the AP-Google Journalism and Technology Scholarship program might be right up your alley. The initiative, announced earlier this week, will offer $20,000 scholarships to six graduate or undergraduate students working toward a degree in any field that combines ...

Human rights activists and free speech advocates have every reason to worry about the future of an open and uncensored internet, but researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo have come up with a new tool that may help put their fears to rest. Their system, called T...

A computer solving a Rubik's cube? P'shaw. Doing it in 10.69 seconds? Been there, record set. But to crack one of any size? Color us impressed. Erik Demaine of MIT claims to have done just that -- he and his team developed an algorithm that applies to cubes no matter how ambitious their dimensi...

We've seen recently that computers are more than capable of kicking humanoids to the curb when it comes to winning fame and fortune, but it's still we humans who dole out the prizes, and one very brainy humanoid just won the best prize in computer science. That person is Leslie Valiant, and the priz...

If you don't know the major problems facing mathematics and computer science, you might not be familiar with the problem of P versus NP. In short, it's a problem which asks, "if 'yes' answers to a yes or no question can be quickly verified, can they also be computed quickly?" Many computer scientis...